Cultural
studies
Cultural studies is an academic field of critical
theory and literary criticism initially introduced by
British academics in 1964 and subsequently adopted by allied academics
throughout the world. Characteristically interdisciplinary, cultural studies is
an academic discipline aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the
forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives. Cultural
Studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many
different approaches, methods and academic perspectives. Distinct from the
breadth, objective and methodology of cultural anthropology and ethnic
studies, cultural studies is focused upon the political dynamics of
contemporary culture and its historical foundations,
conflicts and defining traits. Researchers concentrate on how a
particular medium or message relatesto ideology, socialclass, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and/or gender, rather
than providing an encyclopedic identification, categorization or
definition of a particular culture or area of the world.
Cultural
studies combines feminist theory, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary
theory, media theory, film/video
studies, communication studies, political
economy,translation studies, museum
studies and art
history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various
societies. Thus, cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated,
disseminated, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres
within a given culture. The influential theories of cultural hegemony and agency have emerged from the cultural
studies movement as well as the most recent communications theory, which
attempts to explain the cultural forces behind globalization.
Unique academic approaches to cultural studies have also emerged in the United
States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Italy.
During the 1980s rise of neo-liberalism in
Britain and the new conservatism in America, cultural studies
was beset with criticism from both outside political and inside academic
forces, due to the close alliance between many cultural studies scholars and Marxist
theory, left-wing politics and perceived "triumphalism"
by other established scholars. Opposition to cultural studies was most
dramatically demonstrated with the 2002 closing of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, UK. CCCS was
considered the founding academic program for cultural studies in the world, and
was closed due to the result of the Research Assessment Exercise of 2001,
a holdover initiative of the Margaret
Thatcher-led UK Government of 1986, that determined research funding
for university programs.[2] While
many of its opponents continue to describe the discipline as
"irrelevant," the field has a world-wide presence consisting of
numerous annual international conferences, academic programs, publications,
students and practitioners, from Taiwan to Amsterdam and
from Bangalore to Santa Cruz.
The term was
used by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies or CCCS.[5] It
has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded
Hoggart as Director.
Early years[edit]
From the 1970s
onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige,
Tony Jefferson, Michael Green and Angela
McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. Many
cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods
of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms (the superstructure) and
that of the political economy (the base). By the 1970s,
the politically formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's
manufacturing industries were fading and union rolls were shrinking. Yet
millions of working class Britons backed the rise of Margaret
Thatcher. For Stuart Hall and other Marxist theorists, this shift in
loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party was antithetical
to the interests of the working class and had to be explained in terms of
cultural politics.
Theory of hegemony[edit]
In order to
understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics and culture
in the United Kingdom, scholars at the CCCS turned to the work of Antonio
Gramsci, an Italian thinker of the 1920s and 30s. Gramsci had been
concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and peasants vote for
fascists? In other words, why would working people vote to give more control to
corporations and see their own rights and freedoms abrogated? Gramsci modified classical
Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and
social control. In this view, capitalists used not only brute force (police,
prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also penetrated the
everyday culture of working people. Thus, the key rubric for Gramsci and for
cultural studies is that of cultural
hegemony.
Scott Lash writes:
In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the
fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If
the fundamental Marxists saw power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci
gave to us a question of class alliance. The rise of cultural
studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental
class-versus-class politics.[6]
Edgar and
Sedgwick write:
The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of
British cultural studies [particularly the CCCS]. It facilitated analysis of
the ways in which subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political
and economic domination. The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as
the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology.[7]
Theory of agency
This line of
thinking opened up fruitful work exploring agency, a theoretical outlook which
reinserted the active, critical capacities of all people.[citation needed] Notions of
agency have supplemented much scholarly emphasis on groups of people (e.g. the
working class, primitives, colonized peoples, women) whose political consciousness and scope of
action was generally limited to their position within certain economic and
political structures.[citation needed][original research?] In
other words, many economists, sociologists, political scientists and historians
have traditionally failed to acknowledge that everyday people do indeed play a
role in shaping their world or outlook. Although anthropologists since the
1960s have foregrounded the power of agents to contest structure, first in the
work of transactionalists like Fredrik Barth and
then in works inspired by resistance theory and post-colonial theory.[citation needed][original research?]
At times,
cultural studies' romance with the notion of agency nearly excludes the
possibility of oppression, overlooking the fact that the subaltern have their
own politics, and romanticizes agency, exaggerating its potential and
pervasiveness.[citation needed][original research?] Popular
in the 1990s, many cultural studies scholars discovered in consumers ways of
creatively using and subverting commodities and dominant ideologies.[citation needed] This
orientation has come under fire for a variety of reasons.[citation needed]
Cultural
studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday
life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things, such as
watching television or eating out, in a given culture. In any given practice,
people use various objects (such as iPods or crucifixes).
Hence, this field studies the meanings and uses peoples attribute to various
objects and practices. Recently, as capitalism has
spread throughout the world (a process associated with globalization),
cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to
Western hegemony.[citation needed]
Globalization[
The movement toward globalization in our world
serves as an important reason to examine Cultural Studies. According to Richard
Longworth, author of “Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of
Globalism,” it is just getting started. We are now in the stage of re-invention
instead of industrialization. In the past 20 years, communication technology
has made this possible and has moved very rapidly.[8] Because
we are increasing communication worldwide, globalization has a major effect on
how we look at Cultural Studies because we are constantly being exposed to the
ideologies of mass media. In addition, human culture itself is becoming more
unified as a result of globalization. For example, Stuart Hall has striven to
combine many topic areas of study, such as interpersonal relationships and the
influence of the media. He believes we should be studying the unifying
atmosphere in which they all occur and from which they emanate—human culture.[9] This
human culture is starting to become more and more unified itself because of
globalization and therefore can be further examined through Cultural Studies.
Overview
In his 1994
book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin
Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of
cultural studies:[10]
·
The aim of Cultural Studies is to
examine cultural practices and their relation to power.
For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working class youth in London)
would consider their social practices against those of the dominant culture (in
this example, the middle and upper classes in London who control the political
and financial sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white
working class youth in London).
·
The objective of Cultural Studies
includes understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analyzing the
social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
·
Cultural Studies is both the
object of study and the location of political criticism and action. (For
example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but s/he
would connect this study to a larger, progressive political project.)
·
Cultural Studies attempt to
expose and reconcile the division of knowledge,
to overcome the split between tacit forms of knowledge (cultural) and objective
forms of knowledge (universal).
·
Cultural Studies has a commitment
to an ethical evaluation of modern society and
to a radical line of political action.
Approaches
Within the UK and US[edit]
Scholars in the
United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of
cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British
version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under
the influence of Richard Hoggart, Raymond
Williams, Stuart Hall and
others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly
political left-wing views and criticisms of popular
culture as 'capitalist' mass culture.
It absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt
School critique of the "culture
industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of
early British Cultural Studies scholars and their influences, (see the work of,
for example, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall,Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy).
In contrast,
Cultural Studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition in
the United States (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002,p. 60).The American version
of Cultural Studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the
subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to and uses of mass culture.
For example, American Cultural Studies advocates wrote about the liberatory
aspects of fandom.
The distinction between American and British strands has since faded, however.
Stuart Hall
asserts that mainstream mass communication in the United States holds the
illusion of democratic pluralism- “the pretense that society is held together
by common norms, including equal opportunity, respect for diversity, one
person-one vote, individual rights and rule of law”.[9] One
of his goals in looking at Cultural Studies is to raise awareness and combat
social power imbalances and dominant ideology. “The ultimate issue for cultural
studies is not what information is presented but whose information it is”.[9] Also,
he contends that the aim of theory and research is to delegate power to
marginalized people and allow them to have a say in this world. One criticism
of Hall offered suggestions of ways to change the problem he cites.
Outside the UK and US
In Canada,
Cultural Studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the
emphasis in the work of Marshall
McLuhan, George Grant, and others. In Australia,
there has sometimes been a special emphasis on cultural
policy. In South Africa, human rights and Third World issues
are among the topics treated. There were a number of exchanges between
Birmingham and Italy resulting
in work on Italian leftism and theories of postmodernism.[citation needed] On the
other hand, there is a debate in Latin America about
the relevance of Cultural Studies with some researchers calling for more
action-oriented research.[citation needed] Cultural
Studies is relatively undeveloped in France, where there is a stronger
tradition of semiotics, as in the writings of Roland
Barthes. Also in Germany it is undeveloped, probably due to the
continued influence of the Frankfurt
School, which has developed a body of writing on such topics as mass
culture, modern art and music.
Marxism, feminism and cultural
artifacts
Some
researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model
to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt
School, but especially from thestructuralist Marxism
of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus
of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass
production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural
artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base)
essentially control a culture.
Other
approaches to Cultural Studies, such as feminist cultural
studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from
this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning,
shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest
that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the
product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing Cultural
Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which
seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the
meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and
art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural
studies from viewpoints of art history andpsychoanalysis.
The writer Julia Kristeva was an influential voice in
the turn of the century, contributing to Cultural Studies from the field of art
and psychoanalytical French feminism.
Consumerism
Ultimately, this perspective[clarification needed] criticizes
the traditional view, assuming a passive consumer, particularly by underlining
the different ways people read, receive and interpret cultural
texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject or challenge
the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus
away from the production of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays
an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives
meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming withcultural
identity. Stuart Hall and John Fiske have become influential in
these developments.
Why is
consumerism considered part of culture? According to Jeremy Gilbert, “We now
live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the overriding aim of
government economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels. This is an
era when ‘consumer confidence’ is treated as the key indicator and cause of
economic effectiveness.[11] Not
only is it the government’s goal to keep the public buying and spending, but
it’s also that of many businesses and corporations. This is a major problem
when looking through an environmental lens, because this significant rate of
consumption is leading our planet to a point where it can no longer be
sustained, threatening the human race and all living things. However, if we are
constantly being exposed to advertisements, consumerism doesn’t look like it’s
heading to a halt. This is a major issue when looking at Cultural Studies,
because of mass media’s influence on the ideology of consumerism.[11]
Further information: Consumerism
Text[edit]
In the context
of Cultural Studies, the idea of a text,
not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles:
the texts of Cultural Studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.
Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture".
"Culture" for a cultural studies researcher, not only includes
traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups)[12] and popular
culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two have
become the main focus of Cultural Studies. A further and more recent approach
is Comparative cultural studies, based on the
discipline of comparative literature and Cultural
Studies.
Contemporary cultural studies[edit]
Sociologist Scott Lash has
recently put forth the idea that Cultural Studies is entering a new phase.
Arguing that the political and economic milieu has fundamentally altered from
that of the 1970s. He writes, "I want to suggest that power now... is
largely post-hegemonic... Hegemony was the concept that de facto
crystallized Cultural Studies as a discipline. Hegemony usually refers to the
“preponderant influence or domination of one nation over another."[9] It
has meant domination through ideology or discourse...[13] He
writes that the flow of power is becoming more internalized, that there has
been "a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to
an intensive notion of power from within (including domination
from within) and power as a generative force."[14] Resistance
to power, in other words, becomes complicated when power and domination are
increasingly (re)produced within oneself, within subaltern groups and within exploited
people.
On the same
subject, American feminist theorist and author of Gender
Trouble Judith Butler wrote in the scholarly
journal Diacritics an essay entitled "Further Reflections
on the Conversions of Our Time", in which she described the shift in
these terms:
"The move
from a structuralist account in which capital is
understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a
view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the
thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory
that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed
conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of
the rearticulation of power."
Institutionally,
the discipline has undergone major shifts. The Department of Cultural Studies
at the University of Birmingham, which was descended from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, closed in 2002. Although by this time the intellectual
centre of gravity of the discipline had long since shifted to other
universities throughout the world. Strong Cultural Studies programs can be
found in the United Kingdom, North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia
and there are a host of journals and conferences where Cultural Studies
research is published and presented.
Academic reception[edit]
Cultural
Studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many
different approaches, methods and academic perspectives. As in any academic
discipline, Cultural Studies academics frequently debate among themselves.
However, some academics from other fields have criticised the discipline as a
whole. It has been popular to dismiss Cultural Studies as an academic fad.
Literary scholars[edit]
Yale literature
professor Harold Bloom has been an outspoken critic
of the Cultural Studies model of literary studies. Critics such as Bloom see
cultural studies as it applies to literary scholarship as a vehicle of
careerism by academics, instead of promoting essentialist theories of culture, mobilising
arguments that scholars should promote the public interest by studying what
makes beautiful literary works beautiful.
[T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the
English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary
studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the
universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows
what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness'
remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas,
still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more
than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who
really do represent a treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the
clerks'."[15]
Literary critic Terry
Eagleton is not wholly opposed to Cultural Studies theory like
Bloom, but has criticised certain aspects of it, highlighting what he sees as
its strengths and weaknesses in books such as After Theory (2003).
For Eagleton, literary and cultural
theory have the potential to say important things about the
"fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized
this potential.
Sociologists[edit]
While sociology
was founded upon various historic works purposefully distinguishing the subject
from philosophy or psychology,
Cultural Studies lacks any fundamental literature explicitly founding a new
discipline.
A relevant
criticism comes from Pierre Bourdieu, who working in the
sociological tradition, wrote on similar topics such as photography, art
museums and modern literature. Bourdieu's point is that Cultural Studies lacks
scientific method.[16] His
own work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews. Cultural
Studies is relatively unstructured as an academic field. It is difficult to
hold researchers accountable for their claims, because there is no agreement on
the methods and validity.
Physicists[edit]
Main article: Sokal affair
One of the most
prominent critiques of Cultural Studies came from physicist Alan Sokal,
who submitted an article to a Cultural Studies
journal, Social Text. This article was what
Sokal thought would be a parody of what he perceived to be the
"fashionable nonsense" of postmodernists working
in Cultural Studies. As the paper was coming out, Sokal published an article in
a self-described "academic gossip" magazine Lingua Franca, revealing the hoax. His
explanation for doing this was:
"Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this
silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a
profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries,
the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have
believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality
(both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications
promoted by the powerful -- not to mention being desirable human ends in their
own right. The recent turn of many "progressive" or
"leftist" academic humanists and social scientists toward one or
another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and
undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique.
Theorizing about "the social construction of reality" won't help us
find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global
warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and
politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity."[17]
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar